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Tin House Reels: Luca Dipierro

ByIlana Simons | August 29th, 2013 – 09:45 am

Tin House Reels is a weekly feature on The Open Bar dedicated to the craft of short filmmaking. Curated by Ilana Simons, the series features videos by artists who are building new bridges between visual art, music, and text. Our aim is to showcase work that focuses on the exciting relationship that can exist between the spirit of written literature and the possibilities of film.

Today we are screening Luca Dipierro’s short film Tre Storie Innaturali. Dipierro first cuts his marionettes out of fabric and then painstakingly moves them in small increments to create the illusion of life. His characters live in a community that runs with the energy of missed connections.

Tre Storie feels rich with unanswered questions. Images move up and down: juggled balls, fish skeletons on seesaws, angels in the sky that sing to the lowliest man at the restaurant. The soundtrack (created in collaboration with Rev. Freddie Murphy) keeps tempo, moving between sounds of a dream and the hyper-real.

Dipierro writes of his movies: “What I look for is an emotional cadence that is both sorrowful and comic. I am interested in the compression of the form that books like Italo Calvino’s Fiabe italiane or Jules Renard’s Poil de carotte keep teaching me. Tre Storie Innaturali is…three short stories of miracle, mourning, acrobacy.”

Tre Storie Innaturali will screen this fall at The Last Rites Film Festival in Berlin.

Luca Dipierro is an animator and illustrator born in Italy and living in the USA. His animated films have been called “a perfect balance between creepy and charming” (The Huffington Post) and “sad and beautiful” (L Magazine). His work has been shown in Europe and the USA, and appears regularly on record and book covers. Dipierro is also the author of the art zine Das Ding, and of the book of fictions Biscotti Neri (Madcap, 2011). He lives in Portland, OR with his wife, writer Leni Zumas, and their son Nicholas.

We are now accepting submissions for Tin House Reels. Please upload your previously unpublished videos of 15 minutes or less to Youtube or Vimeo and send a link of your work to tinhousereels@gmail.com.